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Since my first guide “How to make illuminated buttons” I’ve built quite some controllers with illuminated buttons and I found some improvements I want to share today. The original technique had some downfalls. First of all, the latex from the gloves wears quite quickly, it’s not really reliable for everyday use. It also only holds to the casing and it can come loose if someone presses the buttons too strong. Another problem when building it is to find the correct placing of the holes and the keeping the rubber buttons at the correct distance.
My actual technique addresses these two concerns by:

Using white balloons instead of latex gloves. They are much more durable, but you’ll need brighter leds as they are more opaque.

Putting the balloons into a sandwich between a piece of wood and the casing

As outlined in the article Programming ATMEL microprocessors on a Mac, installing the AVR toolchain on the Mac can be a long and tedious procedure. Downloading, compiling and installing all the stuff can take up to 6 hours!

For a workshop I gave recently we tried to simply copy over all the binaries in /usr/local/avr/ and it worked.
Now I wrapped the whole thing into a nice installer package, see below.

Have you ever touched those gummy buttons on an old Sony Betacam recorder? Ever admired this warm glow beneath the play-button? Ever wanted to add some of these to your own do-it-yourself projects, only to find you can’t buy them nowhere?

An intuitive interactive documentary movie editing machine based on principles of molecular biology and evolution theory

docReactor is a research/art project currently under development. It will be published as open source and will be displayed first as docReactor1.0://intuiton at the festival “Science et Cité” at Fribourg, Switzerland, may 20-24 2005

docReactor1.0://intuiton will be an experimental documentary, edited entirely by the visitors, on the place of intuition in science and arts

The VideoBass is an unique hardware/software-combination for controlling live-visuals. Shaped like a electric bass-guitar, it relies on the guitar-paradigm where, basically speaking, the left hand chooses between a wide variety of possible notes, and the right hand triggers them.

Invention et fabrication de la première videobasse - un instrument pour jouer des images…
“The VideoBass is an unique hardware/software-combination for controlling live-visuals. Shaped like a electric bass-guitar, it relies on the guitar-paradigm where, basically speaking, the left hand chooses between a wide variety of possible notes, and the right hand triggers them.”